Catch the Throne: The Mixtape

Launch Point;
2014

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Music from this release

Race has long been a sore spot for speculative fiction: check the latent color consciousness of Tolkien (dark skinned orcs = savages, fair skinned elves = enlightened), the whitewashed galaxies of the early Star Wars films, and The Last Airbender, a silver screen take on a series about Asian people that somehow managed to bleach them out in casting. HBO’s popular adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s swords and sorcery drama Game of Thrones is the latest to weather criticism for its dealings with race, from the noted absence of people of color in early seasons to their depiction in later seasons as uncivilized masses in need of white guidance. With the show returning for a fourth season of blood-soaked castle keep intrigue next month, the network is determined to make inroads to a more diverse viewership. Apparently “attract more minorities” means “pander to urban audiences with rap music” because HBO’s power play for multicultural patronage looks a lot like a mixtape.

Catch the Throne drafts the production team from New York’s Launch Point Records to fashion hip-hop beats out of the show’s rich, dramatic orchestral score and select swatches of dialogue from key characters. The result is a collection of rousing aspirational stompers interspersed with Eastern scales and instrumentation, tasked both with honoring the show’s musical accompaniment and holding the attention of casual onlookers. Launch Point makes a noble go at it, but the source material is too stuffy to allow them to shine. The same could be said of the cadre of rap, reggaeton and dancehall artists featured throughout Catch the Throne, who do their best to skirt the patent absurdity of the mixtape’s premise but invariably end up falling on their own swords.

When these rappers aren’t struggling to explain Martin’s tangled plot and reveling in veiled references to Westeros lore, they’re puking up bored motivational boilerplate. Opener “Mother of Dragons” finds Big Boi unfurling plot intensive lines like “Targaryen, the rightful bloodline/ So don’t you worry about the Red Wedding, that made it crunch time” and “Fuck the Lannisters and everybody that ride with ‘em”. Bodega Bamz spends “Win or Die” tripping on platitudes about life during wartime (“You lose if you break the rules/ Kings do what they have to do”). Nobody can resist a pat joke about dragon taming queen Khaleesi: Bamz “spits fire like Khaleesi”, Wale brings us “that Khaleesi heat” and “The Parallel” sees Dee Goodz in search of a “female species with physical features of the girl Khaleesi”. Barring dancehall star Magazeen’s “Iron Throne”, which succeeds by avoiding show specifics in favor of a fatalistic world-weariness, and “Magical Reality”, Kilo Kish’s fetching mining of Game of Thrones’ undercurrent of sensual mysticism, Catch the Throne is clunker after cringeworthy clunker. Rampant spoilers and the high learning curve for the languages and lore that riddle the lyrics ensure that these songs won’t make any sense to anyone that doesn’t already know the material.

Ideas that look terrible on paper are quite often terrible in practice, and Catch the Throne’s ace conceit, to lure people of color to Game of Thrones with rap music, is executed about as poorly as one could expect. The writing is leagues beneath everyone involved, and the sequencing is nonsensical to a hilarious degree. But beyond that, the notion that a mixtape is a sensible means to boost Game of Thrones’ sinking black and Latin viewership is misguided, if not insulting. If HBO is really interested in expanding into different households it might want to consider presenting people of color in a more complimentary light on the show. Fishing for diversity with a mixtape when the desired audiences are only seen in the series as slaves, savages, thieves and bargaining chips is covering a stab wound with a band-aid. Game of Thrones has problems no amount of hip-hop star power can fix, and Catch the Throne has given back very little in return for the urban cred it’s been loaned here. One can only hope everyone involved caught a princely check for their troubles.